Nine Red Skirts!

It is a charming warm October Sunday with blue skies above,  sun shimmering our bare arms,  a cute Spanish hacienda village hugging a grassy lawn presided by tall trees in the short distance, and here we are ready to entertain in fifteen, ten, five, one  minute, and here we go! Nine red skirts are twirling on the stage and what a joy it is for us to share our program!

Balboa Park San Diego it is and the third weekend in October  belongs annually to the Czechs and Slovaks 🇨🇿🇸🇰 to show what their culture is about! I love to put on an eye-catching embroidered blouse with a red skirt and to share the songs and dances I grew up with. (Thank you mom!) I love to teach the steps to “my girls”, the truly fabulous, fun, polite , appreciative and full of life young ladies, the Czech offsprings living and thriving in San Diego. 

I enjoy composing with them tongue-in-cheek poems  about the Czech history and inventions,  I love  when they correct my English and giggle at some of my strange rhyming,  quickly fixing them to perfection…I love to see them in full concentration  playing ocarinas, I love to be silly with them  on and off a stage, and I enjoy seeing them  becoming tight friends through their eternal chatter in Czech peppered with some English words, through their after-rehearsal on-foot trip to the corner “boba” tea bar, and through an endless exchanging tips how to fix your eyelashes or  hair!

The day of the performance is gorgeous: sunshine helps  to brighten the best scenery of a historical 1935 Spanish international village,  the lawn is filled with people,  the blue ocarinas' lyrical melodies soar up to the highest branches of the old Kauri pine, the dance steps are correct, smiles are wide, songs are in tunes, poems rhyme and are not messed, banjo, accordion, guitar and singing seems to  bring a smile especially when we made the audience sing along! "Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me…”

We hoped  to represent the House of Czech and Slovak and our nations in the best light, after all that is the purpose!

But the road to the performance is as meaningful: the fun rehearsals, the disastrous rehearsal, the messing up over and over this or that until we got it right, the sleepover in my house they asked me to have, the frantic running around my house prior to the performance (after the eventful sleepover) , eight girls, one young boy , many mothers and some fathers, everyone busy ironing,  stitching,  fixing ribbons, collecting ocarinas, cutting strudel, looking for a lost blouse…

It was all so fun and heartwarming, that closeness of being “in it all together”, the desire to prepare a pleasant and telling afternoon for the audience, to teach the girls that to give to others selflessly is a way to go.

And it is all complemented by the parents' camaraderie. The moms usually stay with my husband in the kitchen when the girls rehearse, relaxing, sipping wine and sometimes fixing for all of us a surprise dinner of potato pancakes! The sight of the boisterous mothers  of “my girls” in my kitchen under the gentle command of my husband, each in one of my many aprons, each at a different task loudly talking, is quite something to behold!

And so this post is about my genuine gratitude to the families of these great young ladies.

Gratitude  to the girls  who showed diligence, creativity, sensitivity, empathy, sense of humor, and who stole my heart some time ago.

Gratitude to Frank Drugan, who came up with a plan to organize in 1935 a second exhibit in San Diego after a very successful 1915 Panama-California expo.  He succeeded and San Diego hosted for 377 days in 1935-36 the California-Pacific Exhibition, attracting over 7 million people to visit. 

The unique highlight of that expo is his wonderful idea called the House of Pacific (Peaceful) Relations that personifies the American and world's ideal: to live in harmony. He conceived a plan to build a village with 15 Spanish hacienda-like cottages to be shared by 21 minorities living at that time in San Diego. Frank Drugan called it  “the experiment of brotherly love” by simply putting nations  in one place, giving them space to gather, inspiring them to share their experiences, history, customs, cuisine as he knew that the more we know of each other, the less “strange” we may seem.

And here we are today on this gorgeous Sunday afternoon almost 90 years later, still marveling at that beautiful concept and the fact that today we have a staggering number of almost forty nations sharing this lively colorful happy corner of our Park.

I am glad that today the girls and I, together with all performers, the cottages members, visitors and the audiences, are extending such a noble, beautiful ideal.

Thank you for coming to see us, thank you for singing along with us, thank you for sharing your smile for a performance that belonged to you as we put our heart into every step, every verse and every song! And our love is sent also to those who could not come, but are visiting us right here on these pages! 💃🌺♥️

Thank you Donna Kaspar for your fabulous accordion playing, thank you Moran, Čapek, Svoboda, Pop, Kapička and Hanč families, thank you Olie for being brave as one male dancer in a wild girls’ group, thank you Ayra for always helping with anything we need, thank you Pavel Chvistek for being always there for us with and without banjo, thank you Vladislav Hanc for everyday support and your music, thank you John for perfect sound, thank you House of Czech and Slovak Republic, and thank you our dear audience for coming and rooting for us! ♥️